Jewelcrafting for beginners

As long as I am in the Burning Crusade beta, I am going to write a series of blog posts about the expansion. These are basically spoilers, so if you don't like spoilers, look away. But for the rest of you they might serve as useful hints, and even give you some ideas how to prepare already today for the expansion. I'll write a number of "BC Journal" entries with my observations. But whenever possible I'll group the information on a single subject into one post, for easier reference. This blog entry is about everything I could find out about low level jewelcrafting.

Jewelcrafting can be learned from trainers in the new Draenei and Blood Elf cities, I couldn't find a jewelcrafting trainer in the old cities. As I was playing a Horde character, I flew to Light Hope's Chapel in Eastern Plaguelands, and rode to the Blood Elf city of Silvermoon. Later I found out that there is a teleport between Undercity and Silvermoon, which made traveling back and forth a lot easier. The journeyman, expert, and master trainer are all in one spot, no idea yet where the artisan trainer is hiding.

When you learn apprentice jewelcrafting, you get two new skills in your spellbook: jewelcrafting and prospecting. You also get the first basic recipes. Prospecting is the art of turning ores into gems. Only basic ores, like copper, tin, iron, etc., can be turned into gems. Rare ores like silver and gold, or quest ores like incendite are not prospectable. Prospecting destroys 5 ores, and always gives you one worthless metal powder, plus between zero and two gems. The gems are of the type which you could also find when mining that metal, so Tigerseye and Malachite for copper, and so on. Prospecting is important, because jewelcrafting needs lots of gems, more than normal mining can find. But as prospecing destroys a lot of ore, it makes jewelcrafting use quite a large amount of resources.

As I had already heard about ores being needed, I came to the BC beta with 160 copper ore and 160 tin ore in my bags. That turned out to be not enough. Because besides destroying the ores for gems, you also need lots of metal bars to make either intermediary products or final jewelry. I ended up spending many hours in the beta mining; which was easy, because everybody else was in the new zones, and I had places like the Wetlands or Hillsbrad for me alone to mine. If you plan to do jewelcrafting when the expansion comes out, you should stock at least 200 each of copper and tin, plus gems and silver. I got my jewelcrafting up to 110 before I needed the first iron, but unfortunately the first iron item also needed large fangs, and I wasn't prepared for that. All other items I could skill up with either needed silver, shadowgems, or moonstone, none of which are very easy to find, and so I'm blocked at 110 right now.

You might have heard about socketed items and gems to put into these sockets being made by jewelcrafting. Well, not at the lower levels. There don't seem to be any socketed items below level 60, nor does it seem that a jewelcrafter can do any socketable gems before 225 skill. I assume that is something the artisan trainer teaches you, the one I haven't found yet.

The main product at jewelcrafting up to 110 are rings, plus some necklaces. As low level rings and necklaces aren't very common up to now, jewelcrafting will be useful to equip low level characters with jewelry. I heard, but couldn't confirm, that there will be recipes for enchanters to enchant jewelry, adding further bonuses.

The other product of jewelcrafting is statues, which are made from the stones (rough stone, coarse stone, heavy stone, etc.) which you find when mining. 10 stones make one statue, which is a clickable object in your inventory. When you use it, you summon a cute mini earth elemental pet, which heals you for a couple of seconds. Not by very much, but might be useful to classes which don't have other combat healing methods available. Unfortunately the statues are bind on pickup, only the jewelcrafter himself can use them.

Up to now I'm not terribly impressed by jewelcrafting. Lots of people will try it, just because it is new, but just like the other item-producing tradeskills, the quality of the crafted items isn't all that great. I was able to make one blue ring, with good stats for its level. It was interesting because when you make it, you don't know what stats it will have. You get a ring with a random "of the animal" name. I got a "of the tiger" ring, with +4 agility, +3 strength. The ring was labeled "Unique - equipped", meaning that I could have several in my inventory, but could only equip one of them.

To explore jewelcrafting further, I loaded up my Alliance priest with tons of metals and gems, and copied him to the BC beta. You can only copy 4 characters, and copying takes 2 days, so it will take a while before I can tell you more about higher level jewelcrafting, if I ever get there. But I have decided that my Horde priest, who currently has mining and tailoring, will not give up tailoring to learn jewelcrafting. I think I will take one of my level 40ish alts and make him a jewelcrafter instead, sending him the metals mined by my priest. This is not really a "must have" tradeskill.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:43 AM Permanent Link